Scotiabank Focuses on Commercial Customers

Scotiabank already has a customer-centric view of its retail customers.

Scotiabank already has a customer-centric view of its retail customers. Now, it's time to bring that capability to the commercial bank, according to Steve Klein, vice president, IS project management, Scotiabank (Toronto, U.S. $215 million in assets). To do so, the bank selected the services of Pivotal Corp. (Vancouver, B.C.) at the beginning of 2004. "It will provide us with the platform to allow us to have an integrated snapshot of our business customer," Klein says.

The solution - expected to enter pilot mode by November - will include a contact management system that moves customers from lead generation to prospecting to the customer file. The impact of the system will be felt throughout the commercial banking organization, Klein asserts.

"It will allow us to track all of the opportunities and activities associated with that customer," he says. "And even more importantly, it will allow us to tie all of those activities directly to the officers' sales targets, sales goals and sales completion, and tie right back into their performance management and compensation aspects for the year."

Measuring the success of the project starts with adoption by its users, Klein notes. But as with any IT project at Scotiabank, the expected benefits are monitored very closely. "We have several different work enhancements, all of which are being monitored, all of which have their own stated benefits and objectives, and all of which have their own financial targets," he explains. "We're very much a homegrown organization that can execute extremely well on these types of initiatives."